US flight grounding leaves days of travel chaos in its wake

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The Trump administration blamed old and “overloaded” technical infrastructure for the failure, and used it to demand the US Congress appropriate $US50 billion for new systems.

Washington: A ground stop for all flights across the United States due to “extraordinary circumstances and for reasons of safety” has been lifted, more than four hours after authorities reported serious air traffic control communications issues.

The shutdown caused chaos at airports, with airlines cancelling more than 8000 flights, according to flight-tracking service FlightRadar24. Thousands more were delayed.

The ground stop order had meant flights in the air could land, but those on the ground could not take off. The disruption quickly spread beyond the United States, forcing the cancellation of flights from Canada and Europe. US airspace handles about 45,000 flights a day.

US Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) issued the nationwide ground stop “following a communication issue impacting all Air Route Traffic Control Centres”.

Despite systems being back in operation, he warned travellers that delays would take time to ease. “Now, does that mean every flight is going to fly right now? It’s going to be slow, right? So if you’re watching, you’re at an airport, check with your airline,” he said.

The ground stop was issued on Friday afternoon in Washington (about 8am Saturday AEDT) and lifted at 8.15pm (12.15pm Saturday AEDT). The cause of the system failure was not immediately clear.

Urging calm, Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin told reporters at the White House the ground stop was ordered out of an abundance of caution, and there was no suggestion at this stage that a cyberattack was to blame.

“There is no indication, and we had no reason to believe as of right now, that this was a threat to the United States,” he said. “This was a telecommunication outage throughout FAA.”

But Mullin also said nothing could be ruled out at this point. He said he saw no reason to connect Friday’s telecommunications issue with the outage that affected Microsoft systems around the world the previous day.

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